Sullivan, Louisin full Louis Henry Sullivan ( born September 3, 1856 , Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died April 14, 1924 , Chicago, Illinois ) American architect, regarded as the spiritual father of modern American architecture and identified with the aesthetics of early skyscraper design. His more than 100 works in collaboration (1879–95) with Dankmar Adler include the Auditorium Building, Chicago (1887–89); the Guaranty Building, Buffalo, New York (1894–95; now Prudential Building); and the Wainwright Building, St. Louis, Missouri (1890–91). Frank Lloyd Wright apprenticed for six years with Sullivan at the firm. In independent practice from 1895, Sullivan designed the Schlesinger & Mayer department store (1898–1904; now Carson Pirie Scott & Co.the Sullivan Center) in Chicago. His Autobiography was published shortly before he died.

Early years

Louis was born of Patrick, a dancing master, and Adrienne Françoise (List) Sullivan. His Irish-born father and Swiss-born mother had immigrated to the United States in 1847 and 1850, respectively, and were married in 1852. Their older son, Albert Walter, was born in 1854. Sullivan attended public schools in the Boston area and spent summers on his grandparents’ farm in nearby South Reading. When his parents moved to Chicago in 1869, Sullivan stayed behind with his grandparents and later with neighbours, commuting to school in Boston.

In September 1872 he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which had the first architectural school in the United States (founded 1865). Sullivan was an impatient architectural student and left at the end of the year with thoughts of studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris or of being an apprentice to an architect. He discussed his ideas in New York City with Richard Morris Hunt, one of the fashionable architects of the day and the first American to study architecture at the Beaux-Arts. Hunt suggested he work with the Philadelphia firm of Furness and Hewitt. Sullivan was hired, staying for several months until work dwindled in the economic panic of 1873. In November he left for Chicago and was soon employed in the architectural office of a prominent figure in the development of the style of the Chicago School, William Le Baron Jenney. The office foreman, John Edelmann, became his friend.

The idea of studying in Paris persisted, however, and in July 1874 Sullivan sailed for Europe. He worked hard to pass the difficult entrance examinations for the Beaux-Arts, although after he was accepted he proved to be a restless and erratic student. He made a brief excursion to Florence and Rome. A romantic young man with sideburns, he affected a certain swagger in dress. During the single year he remained in Paris, he was attached to the atelier of the architect Émile Vaudremer.

Work in association with Adler

Back in Chicago in June 1875, Sullivan worked briefly as a draftsman for a number of firms. One such job was for the recently formed firm of Johnston and Edelmann. It was John Edelmann who made the momentous introduction of Sullivan to his future partner, Dankmar Adler. In 1879 Sullivan joined Adler’s office and in May 1881, at the age of 24, became a partner in the firm of Adler and Sullivan, Architects. Their 14-year association produced more than 100 buildings, many of them landmarks in the history of American architecture.

Sullivan’s brilliance as a designer was complemented by Adler’s business ability, his tact with clients, and his knowledge of technical matters, especially acoustics. After coming to Chicago in 1861, Adler had worked as a draftsman, and he returned to the city after serving in the Civil War. In 1871 he formed a successful partnership with Edward Burling that lasted until 1879. As an independent architect Adler designed Central Music Hall in Chicago (1879), which was the prototype of theatres later designed by the firm of Adler and Sullivan. Adler was a consultant on acoustics and in his later years was a writer on the technical and legal aspects of architecture.

Although Adler and Sullivan did substantial residential work, it was in their commercial work that they made their art-historic contribution. Most of their buildings were in Chicago, where the commercial expansion of the 1880s resulted in many commissions.

The early years of the Adler and Sullivan practice did not result in buildings of lasting interest, however. It was the commission in 1886 to design the Auditorium Building in Chicago that marked the first period of Sullivan’s design maturity. This project was a curious combination of a hotel and office block wrapped in a U-shape around a 3,982-seat auditorium for opera. Completed in December 1889, it is a 10-story-high building of granite and limestone with a 17-story tower. The noble arcaded exterior is very simple in profile, has little ornament, and owes much to the architect Henry Hobson Richardson’s design for the Marshall Field Wholesale Store, then recently completed in Chicago. The interior, however, is lavishly decorated with relief ornament and coloured stenciled patterns, all of which brought forth Sullivan’s great talent for designing ornamentation. The interior of the auditorium (restored 1967) is particularly opulent and features gilded plasterwork and countless electric light bulbs. The decoration, which is dazzling and properly theatrical, owes nothing to historical eclecticism. The astonishingly effective acoustical design of the auditorium was the work of Adler, who was also responsible for all structural and mechanical aspects of the building.

Even before the auditorium proper was complete, the Adler and Sullivan firm moved to offices on the 16th floor of the tower, then the highest office suite in Chicago. It was there that the young Frank Lloyd Wright spent six years as apprentice to Sullivan. Wright left in 1893 after a quarrel with Sullivan, and it was not until 1914 that the friendship was renewed. Wright always acknowledged, however, the influence of Sullivan in shaping his work and ideas.

The 10-story Wainwright Building in St. Louis is the most important skyscraper designed by Sullivan. Unlike the Auditorium Building, the exterior walls of which are solid masonry and load bearing, it is of steel frame throughout, an idea advanced by William Le Baron Jenney in 1883–85 in Chicago. Jenney and others were unable to give visual expression to the height of a tall building and often resorted to unsuitable historical styles. Sullivan, however, took the problem in hand and made his design a “proud and soaring” unity. He gave his building a two-story base, above which the vertical elements are stressed and the horizontals, being recessed, are minimized. These vertical rhythms are capped by a deep decorative frieze and a projecting cornice. The 16-story Guaranty (now Prudential) Building in Buffalo by Adler and Sullivan is similar except that its surface is sheathed in decorative terra-cotta instead of red brick. Both buildings are among the best of Adler and Sullivan’s work.

The 1893 Columbian Exposition held in Chicago was a great disappointment to Louis Sullivan. The opportunity to design an international fair with imagination was passed over in favour of a loose adaptation of Classical architecture. The spectacle of an ensemble of these all-white buildings was an enormous success with the public. The Adler and Sullivan contribution was the Transportation Building, which stood apart and was painted in various strong colours as if in protest. It was a long, low arcaded building with a large polychromed archway entrance (the so-called Golden Door). Not all visitors were impressed by the neo-Roman grandeur of the fair. André Bouilhet, a delegate representing a Parisian decorative-arts union, praised the originality of the Transportation Building. Furthermore, he arranged for a small exhibit in Paris of Sullivan’s work, including a plaster cast of the Golden Door and some photographs of his taller buildings. The exhibit later went to Russia and Finland. This European recognition, however, did not allay Sullivan’s bitterness. He considered the Exposition a rejection of the progressive architecture that he saw developing in the Midwest. “The damage wrought by the World’s Fair,” he wrote, “will last for half a century from its date, if not longer. It has penetrated deep into the constitution of the American mind.” It is with this event that Sullivan ended the Autobiography of an Idea (1924), his account of his career and his architectural theories.

Later work

The economic depression that began in 1893 severely curtailed commissions. With a lucrative offer as designer and agent for the Crane Elevator Company, Adler reluctantly decided in 1895 to withdraw from architecture. Sullivan reacted badly, accusing Adler of disloyalty. Adler’s new job proved unsatisfactory, and he decided to return to architecture six months later. His offer to reestablish the firm was unwisely refused by Sullivan, and Adler opened his own office in another part of the Auditorium Building, where he practiced until his death in 1900.

In 1895, proud and optimistic, Sullivan began to practice by himself. His temperament was unsuited, however, to the handling of all of the phases of architectural practice. New work was slow in coming. George Grant Elmslie, whom he had hired in 1889 at age 18, remained a loyal employee. Nevertheless, he was aware of Sullivan’s shortcomings:

He could be arrogant and unnecessarily decisive…prone to give advice where not needed, to good clients…he lost many jobs because he would not compromise his ideals, nor play fast and loose with vital conceptions of what was fitting for the purpose intended.

A simple tabulation of Sullivan’s 20 commissions during the last 30 years of his life indicates the near collapse of his practice.

Among the few major commissions Sullivan received was the one for the Schlesinger & Mayer department store in Chicago, occupied by Carson Pirie Scott & Co. since from 1904 to 2007. Two connecting units were built between 1899 and 1904, and a third unit was added in 1906 by Daniel H. Burnham and Co., largely following Sullivan’s original design. In contrast to the vertical emphasis of the Wainwright and Guaranty buildings, which are offices, the design for this the department store stresses the horizontal. Particularly notable are the rectangular “Chicago windows”—each a large fixed pane flanked by movable sash windows. The elegant simplicity of the upper floors is in contrast to the lavish decoration of the first two, which have windows that were treated as display windows, with the architectural decoration forming rich picture frames. This cast-iron ornament is based on a combination of geometric and stylized floral forms. Much of it is thought to have been designed by Elmslie, in emulation of Sullivan’s style. In any case, the decoration of the Carson Pirie Scott & Co. storebuilding, particularly the ornament over the main entrance, represents the height of Sullivan’s achievement as a designer of architectural ornamentation. Only the decorative panels that once surrounded Sullivan’s Gage Building in Chicago were a match for its decorative exuberance.

Greater plastic richness and a heightened subjectivity are apparent in Sullivan’s work after 1895. His 12-story Bayard (now Condict) Building in New York City was embellished with molded terra-cotta and cast-iron ornament.

As his flourishing years with Adler became a provoking memory, Sullivan grew lonely and difficult. He became estranged from his brother Albert, who was a successful official of the Illinois Central Railroad and who also lived in Chicago. The middle-aged Sullivan became something of a recluse, seeking solace in writing and in visits to his winter cottage in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. His marriage in 1899 to Margaret Davies Hattabough did little to bring lasting happiness; they were separated in 1906 and divorced in 1917 without having had children. With declining income, Sullivan moved to progressively cheaper hotels in an effort to economize. By 1909 a lack of commissions reduced him to desperate straits; he was forced to sell his library and household effects. Perhaps an equal loss was the departure that year of Elmslie, his assistant for 20 years, who went to join forces in Minneapolis with William Gray Purcell, an architect who had worked briefly for Sullivan in 1903.

Particularly noteworthy projects undertaken in his last years were seven banks in a number of small Midwestern towns, beginning with the National Farmers’ (now Security) Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota. Sullivan’s work habits had become erratic, and it is known that this particular design is primarily the work of Elmslie. It has a simple cube form pierced on two sides by large arched windows. Its walls of red sandstone and brick, which convey a sense of security, are ornamented by bands of coloured mosaic and blue-green glazed terra-cotta. The balance between simple form and decoration in this structure has been much admired. The square interior was designed in harmony with the exterior: semicircular murals appear opposite the two arched windows.

Another attractive bank design is that of the Merchants’ National Bank in Grinnell, Iowa (1914). Like the Owatonna bank, it has a relatively austere form, relieved by imaginative, intricate ornament. The facade is embellished with a spectacular decorative frame for the circular window above the entrance. Sullivan’s last commission was the facade for the Krause Music Store in Chicago (1922).

Sullivan had to abandon his Auditorium tower suite in 1918 for a small second-floor office. In 1920 he had no office at all and was reduced to living in one bedroom, being supported by friends. His workplace came to be a desk in the office of a Chicago terra-cotta company, where he was able to complete two significant projects: the writing of his Autobiography and the completion of 19 plates for A System of Architectural Ornament According with a Philosophy of Man’s Powers (1924). He died a week after he had received published copies of these two works. Sullivan was buried in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, next to the graves of his parents and within sight of the Getty and Ryerson tombs, which he had designed. Later, a modest stone was erected by friends. Much later, in 1946, the American Institute of Architects awarded him its Gold Medal.

Assessment

Sullivan was a spokesman for the reform of architecture, an opponent of historical eclecticism, and did much to remake the image of the architect as a creative personality. His own designs are characterized by richness of ornament. His importance lies in his writings as well as in his architectural achievements. These writings, which are subjective and metaphorical, suggest directions for architecture, rather than explicit doctrines or programs. Sullivan himself warned of the danger of mechanical theories of art.

Sources of Sullivan’s ideas have been traced to the mid-19th-century writings of two Americans, the sculptor Horatio Greenough and the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as to the English naturalist Charles Darwin. Darwin’s writings on evolution, particularly on organic growth, left their mark on European writers on architecture and, in turn, on Sullivan’s own thinking. The French architect César-Denis Daly, for example, in an essay reprinted in a Chicago architectural journal, stated that

each style of architecture…being born of the intellectual and moral forces of a human society…, has become naturally the expression of a certain civilization…The adoption by one age of a style…other than that which it has itself created, is hence in itself a false principle.

Out of such inquiries into the nature of style came Sullivan’s own famous dictum “form follows function,” a phrase that should not lead one to conclude that Sullivan believed that a design should be a mechanistic visual statement of utility. Rather, he believed that architecture must evolve from and express the environment in addition to expressing its particular function and its structural basis. It has been said that Sullivan was the first American architect to think consciously of the relationship between architecture and civilization.

The skyscraper was central to both Sullivan’s writing and his practice, and it is on this subject that his thought is most concise. His pre-skyscraper commercial buildings in Chicago, such as the Rothschild Store and the Troescher Building, show a conscious clarification and opening up of the facade. This simplification is carried into his “skyscrapers,” the Wainwright and the Guaranty, which are conceived as “a single, germinal impulse or idea” that permeates “the mass and its every detail with the same spirit.” The exceptional clarity of Sullivan’s designs has lost some of its impact because contemporary architecture has in part absorbed his ideas. Sullivan considered it obvious that the design of a tall office building should follow the functions of the building and that, where the function does not change, the form should not change. Unfortunately, Sullivan’s most dramatic skyscraper design, the Fraternity Temple (1891), intended for Chicago, was never built. This was to be a symmetrical structure with bold step-back forms and a soaring 35-story central tower.

Sullivan was just as much a revolutionary in his ornament as he was in his use of plain surfaces and cubic forms. His ornament was not based on historical precedent but rather upon geometry and the stylized forms of nature. Although his early ornament has some links to that of the Gothic Revival style and to the Queen Anne style, his mature ornament, seen best in his works at the turn of the century, is indisputably his own. It stands as a curious yet unrelated parallel to Art Nouveau ornamentation in Europe. Crisp yet fluid, tightly constructed yet exuberant, these designs remind one of Sullivan’s feeling that architecture should not only serve and express society but also illuminate the heart.

Sullivan’s own Autobiography of an Idea (1924) and Kindergarten Chats (published serially in 1901–02) are indispensable for a grasp of his architectural theory. The 1947 Wittenborn edition of the latter, Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (rev. 1918), includes eight additional essays by Sullivan and a bibliography.